Duty of care in horse welfare: we haven't got it quite right yet and we can't really argue otherwise.

Earlier this week readers of popular equestrian magazine Horse & Hound voiced their outrage over photos of horses jumping over and, sometimes onto, a ditch-bound car during a Charity Ride in Co Tyrone, Northern Ireland.

Undoubtedly a dangerous pastime, pictures of the incident and subsequently-injured horses reportedly left readers 'horrified'. Horse & Hound, a magazine with strong hunting roots, received angry comments calling for 'this sort of stupidity' to be outed and the 'major case of animal cruelty' to be made public.

A welfare investigation into the NI Charity Ride is underway. Rightly-so. A spokesman for the USPCA told Horse & Hound Magazine: “It seems the welfare of the horses was not a consideration.The riders can choose to expose themselves to risk, the horses are not given this option."

Well said. In a nutshell, that's what it boils down to. The term 'Duty of Care' describes our responsibility to meet the welfare needs of the animals we control or own. This extends across all equestrian sports. Ethically, it matters because horses don't really get a choice and most often they cannot foresee the consequences of our human actions. Legally, we're obliged to observe this duty because it's written into the Animal Welfare Act.

Beyond the realm of veterinary medicine, overt cruelty, doping and sportshorse fatalities , the subject of ethics is little discussed in the equestrian circles.

Ironic really, that following the outrage of the car-jumping incident, the Grand National should receive so much support from horse lovers nationwide. A race where, out of the 39 starters, 20 horses failed to complete. One equine ﻿fatality﻿ from that day has already been reported. Albeit, a different race, but the same venue, same occasion.

No horses died in the car-jumping incident in Northern Ireland, but it's reasonable to assume that the owners of Mountain View Equestrian will suffer considerably as a result of their actions, with or without prosecution. It's unlikely that, proportionately-speaking, Aintree Racecourse and the owners of the, now deceased, horse Seedling will stand to lose as much.